Swimming Oddity: A Medal Contender From Finnish Waters

July 25, 1996|By Bonnie DeSimone, Olympic Bureau.

AUBURN, Ala. — Jani Sievinen and his father have combined to create an evolutionary oddity, like a warm-blooded amphibian.

They were their own lab subjects. Sievinen is a world-champion swimmer from Finland whose DNA strings tend to run more toward ski jumping and the biathlon. The country's two Olympic swimming medals, both bronzes, came 72 years apart, in 1920 and 1992.

Since none of Finland's eight 50-meter pools is within convenient commuting distance, Sievinen trains in a 25-meter, four-lane pool. Esa Sievinen, a former lifeguard and carpenter who has coached his son since Jani was 4, schooled himself by watching videos and taking a few clinics.

"He learned with me," said Jani Sievinen on the deck at Auburn University, where he trained before the Olympics.

"My father just knew. I don't know why, he just knew how to coach. If we have a big argument, we keep everything at poolside and not with us back home. While I'm training, he's not my father, he's my coach."

Sievinen, 22, is a compact 5 feet 11, and weighs 165 pounds, the antithesis of the beanpole build usually required to excel in his specialty, the 200-meter individual medley.

The man who has swum the best time in the world this year, Tom Dolan of Arlington, Va., is 6-feet 6, 180, with the reach of an albatross. But Sievinen has not lost the 200 IM since the Barcelona Olympics four years ago, when he finished an underachieving fourth.

He now claims a streak of 38 wins in the event, the crowning moment coming with his world-record swim of 1 minute 58.16 seconds in the 1994 world championships.

Esa Sievinen, 46, a former junior national champion sprinter, said he would have steered his son into the water regardless of what talent he might have shown in more traditional Nordic pursuits.

"All the world makes swimming--140 countries," he said through an interpreter. "Very few nations ski. I could have found another sport that would have been easy to achieve that level, but I didn't want to achieve something low, I wanted to achieve something high."

Sievinen has had a sub-par Olympics thus far. He failed to make the finals of the 400 IM, where he was expected to give Dolan a race, and dropped out of the 200 freestyle, an event he won at last year's European championships, after tying for the eighth and last qualifying spot not once but twice.

Thursday is his last chance to try to meet Finland's newly raised expectations. One survey showed he has 91 percent name recognition factor back home.

He admits his high profile has its downside. "Now, I'm working always under big pressure," he said. "Everyone wants to know what I'm doing when I'm shopping. . . . They think I will win, of course, but it's not so simple. There's seven other finalists. They are hungry."